Google+ Vice President of Product Bradley Horowitz has received a promotion and will now step up to take the place of David Besbris. This change comes less than a year after Vic Gundotra left the company and the social network that he had led since its inception. This makes Horowitz the third person to head up Google+.

Right now a mobile payment system is kind of like a pair of Crocs in the mid-2000s: everyone has to have one and it isn't clear why. Of course Google Wallet has been around for years, but now that Apple Pay (and Samsung Pay, and apparently everyone is paying everything) is around Google needs something a little more competitive, perhaps using those newly-acquired Softcard assets. We've known about Android Pay, a new mobile payment API, for a few weeks.

There's no beating the adorably cute Friends Furever Android commercial, but Google can still try to bring some "oh" and "awww" into more ads for its platform. This new Be Together, Not The Same video is all about people from various age groups using their Android phones and tablets for fun and youthful stuff.

For Android fans, Google's corporate head quarters in Mountain View has taken on the mythical status of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. But for all the cool stuff that comes out of it, the Googleplex is essentially just a collection of big office buildings, no more or less interesting than any of the wide office parks in that part of California. Google is preparing to build a new campus, and its current proposal to the city council shows off a series of buildings that aren't quite like anything else in the world.

The most striking part of the proposal is the huge translucent covering that wraps around the Google spaces, creating an effect somewhere between an enormous circus tent and greenhouse.

Google is cancelling the upcoming iteration of Pwnium, the competition they have sponsored regularly over the past several years. Pwnium has been very useful for Google in protecting Chrome and Chrome OS, because the entire event is about finding holes in the Chromium project. Why did they cancel it, then? For the sake of security!

Google's search indexing is kind of a big deal - having a high spot in relevant searches for the world's biggest search engine can literally make or break a business. So if you don't want your site to lose its spot, you'd better make sure your website looks good when accessed from a mobile browser. Starting on April 21st, Google's search algorithm will incorporate whether or not a site is "mobile-friendly" when ranking its appearance in search results. Google announced the change on its Webmaster Central blog:

Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal.

$25 Million. That's a lot of money for a little appendage that comes after a website's name. But Google saw potential in the tri-letter combo of .app and has finally won the ICANN's auction for the top level domain. This auction follows many other high-profile ones, where Dot Tech nabbed .tech for $6.7 Million (allegedly against Google), and Amazon grabbed .buy for almost $5 Million and .spot for $2.2 Million. By comparison, Google's auction has gone a lot higher, but it's understandable given the current interest in applications and our culture of Internet services.

However, this isn't Google's only top level domain — the company already has a few to its name like .ads, .eat, .fly, which aren't yet open to the public.

The Czar has spoken. After his anointment as Google's Senior Vice President of Products last October, which put him in charge of Chrome, Android, search, ad technology, Google+, Maps, social, commerce and infrastructure, Sundar had been operating in incognito mode, occasionally letting loose a few tidbits of information, like Inbox' deployment to Apps users. In a recent interview with Forbes, the man behind most of the things we talk about here on Android Police has answered some interesting questions regarding his vast portfolio of products, tried to put an end to a few concerns, and remained mum about other issues.

On Google+

The most intriguing section of the interview starts when Google+ is addressed.

Have you ever used Google+ on a mobile browser? It has never been very fun. Trying to share something or make sense of a link was no better. However, after over a year without noticeable improvements for mobile browsers, it has finally gotten a revamp. In fact, it's arguably a better experience than the current Google+ app for Android.

Here's a look at the new mobile web app.

If you don't remember how it was before, here are a couple snaps from Google's out-of-date mobile web apps page: